TODO: ros-fuerte-swig-wx: Depending on your hardware, you may have to build https://github.com/wg-debs/swig-wx from source if you wish to use the graphical tools in ROS. You will need to make sure you have 'automake' installed before attempting to run 'autogen.sh' and the rest of the swig-wx build scripts.

rosinstall

The following steps requires two separate installation steps and will compile ROS-related code into two separate places/layers:

Download and install the underlying core ROS libraries and tools into /opt/ros/fuerte.

Download and build some higher-level ROS libraries using rosmake in ~/ros.

The compiled code from (1) is installed into /opt/ros/fuerte. While it is possible to install elsewhere (e.g. /usr), this is not well tested and you will encounter various problems along the way (e.g. having to change rosinstall files, having to manually install system dependencies, etc...). Please see REP 122: Filesystem Hiearchy Layout for more detailed documentation on how the installed files are placed.

The compiled code from (2) is simply built using rosmake, which is familiar to users of previous versions of ROS. The higher-level ROS stacks are download and build in subdirectories inside the ~/ros directory.

For people having trouble with rosinstall or catkin on their particular OS: If you have downloaded the source files in a different way, you need to run catkin_init_workspace ~/ros-underlay. This script is part of catkin, which should by now also at least be in your workspace, you can use the script without installing catkin. It should create a suitable global CMakeLists.txt to use in the next step.

If you do not want to use catkin, follow standard cmake procedure for building cmake packages, and install the packages in the dependency order by manually checking the package.xml declarations.

Useful TIP:If you encounter problems with the make command due to "Unable to find 'swig.swg'" and "Unable to find 'python.swg'" errors then it probably due to the installation script having placed /swig at the toplevel/root directory.

To get around this problem do the following (and then restart make process as above)

cd /
sudo cp -r /swig /usr/local/share
cd ~/ros-underlay/build

Useful TIP:If you are having trouble with the make install command due to lib64 and lib problems, a work around is

This makes the lib and the lib64 directory linked together and the make install command should work now.

Verify the installed environment:

. /opt/ros/fuerte/setup.sh
which roscore

You should see:

/opt/ros/fuerte/bin/roscore

You can delete ~/ros-underlay now, if you wish. The ROS core libraries are now installed onto your system.

Layer 2: Higher-level robotics libraries and tools

Now it's time to create the second layer, which contains your main robotics libraries (e.g. navigation) as well as visualization tools like rviz. You will build this layer using rosmake, but it is not installed.

There are many different libraries and tools in ROS. We provided four default configurations to get you started.

NOTE: The rosinstall installation files below assume that you've installed into /opt/ros/fuerte, so you will need to change them manually if you have a different install path.